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Why is Python popular, while Lisp and Scheme aren't?

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters mertz at gnosis.cx
Sun Dec 1 13:18:38 EST 2002 
Kenny Tilton <ktilton at nyc.rr.com> wrote previously:
|>>The bottom line is that no regular Lisper is bothered by parens [...]

|Anders J. Munch wrote:
|> Or to put it another way, noone who is bothered by parens becomes a
|> regular Lisper.

Kenny Tilton <ktilton at nyc.rr.com> wrote previously:
|Cute, but I will go out on a limb and say no one who tried Lisp and
|liked it was driven away by parens.

Well... isn't that -exactly- Anders point (and the point of the other
99.9% of programmers who don't use Lisp)?!

Most people who tried Lisp didn't like it BECAUSE of the parens.  They
drive away programmers like me... ones who otherwise like multi-paradigm
languages, functional coding, dynamic typing, etc.  Python I love.
Haskell looks really cool (but admittedly I haven't done anything real
with it).  Ruby has an appeal.  Smalltalk, ditto.  I've even written
some Perl code.

But despite (or because of) reading several popular and widely
recommended Lisp books, I just cannot look at it for very long -because
of the parens-.

The thing is, I really WANT to like Lisp.  I just cannot seem to force
myself to.  Then again, emacs also seems like a strange, unmanageable
monstrosity... so I guess those go hand in hand.

Yours, Lulu...

P.S. I think I've mentioned this analogy before, but I guess I will
again.  Slavoj Zizek discusses Pascal's Wager.  To wit:  Pascal argues
that belief in God/Xtianity is a good way of playing the odds:  if
you are wrong, you were foolish during life, then you are dust; if you
are right, eternal salvation and all that (yeah, I know the flaws in the
probabalistic argument).  But Zizek claims that the naive understanding
misses Pascal's reversal:  No one who does not already believe will be
convinced by the Wager as an argument... rather the Wager makes profound
sense to those who -already believe-.

If only I could -believe- that all the parens make things easier, then I
would be able to understand how much easier they make things :-).

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